These days…

You know these days when you have a lot of time (the whole day or the whole afternoon, or several hours) to study your language but end up doing nothing?

There are so many things that you want to do (or need to do) that you don’t know where to start. If you decide to do something first, you end up thinking that this other thing is more important and switch to it. Then you realise that you should definitely do something else and switch again.

There are also the things you don’t want to do and avoid doing by spending your time in other more pleasant but not so useful activities. And of course, instead of actually doing things, you search the internet for tips on how to do them.

In the end, you feel frustrated because you did spend the whole day “studying” your language, but you didn’t do anything really.

I guess this happens to all of us. It happens to me all the time! But my life does not depend on my Japanese level, I’m learning Japanese as a hobby, and I do enjoy spending my day with Japanese even if I am not actively studying it!

Don’t be too hard on yourself if you feel that you haven’t been productive, we don’t need to be productive all the time, we don’t need to be progressing all the time, and we don’t need to check boxes on our to-do list all the time!

Welcome to my blog! I have been learning Japanese for several years now, and my goal is to be able to read novels in Japanese. I passed N1 in July 2019, and I spend most of my study time learning vocabulary and grammar and reading novels in Japanese. I can read genre fiction (I particularly love mystery novels), but my level is still too low to allow me to read literary fiction. There’s still a lot of work to be done, and my blog is here to help me in my journey!

Japanese names

On this blog, Japanese names are written (in English) with the first name first and the family name last.